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Few concepts are guaranteed to get us hot under the collar like the announcement that Audi are resurrecting the idea of the original Quattro. The motorshow at Paris is after all one of those events where legends "

Audi Quattro: The Power of Four

If someone hadn’t invented Group B rally at the start of the eighties, the times would have defined the form and it would have happened anyway. All of a sudden, what had been a relatively worthy, moustached and tweeded form of motor racing went into the excessive stratosphere.

Balance, proportion and engineering innovation defined the four-squared form of the Quattro

‘Vorsprung Durch Technik’ was a strapline that suited the Quattro’s innovations perfectly and put the four rings of Audi firmly at the forefront of European car culture.

Extensive testing in snow and ice honed the Quattro’s rally ability

Introduced in 1980, the Quattro was the first production car to feature 4WD.

The Pikes Peak-winning factory S1 of 1986 produced a ridiculous 591 HP. French lady driver Michelle Mouton strode to fame in this beast.

Walter Rohrl made good use of the short wheelbase of the 1985 Quattro S1

Group B Rally’s short-lived spectacular made a cult out of the AUdi Quattro

And of all the Group B Rally cars, it was the Quattro that captured the imagination. Having been introduced on the streets at the end of 1980, the Audi Quattro instantly evoked an Olympian, fundamentally tonic blend of power and technology that left anything built in the West Midlands looking about as stale as an old cheese sandwich on a strike-wracked Leyland factory floor.

When ITV’s World of Sport began to cover Group B rallying, the British public didn’t need Dickie Davis to tell them that the future had arrived, and that the future was all about four wheel drive and Turbochargers. The Triumph Dolomite – which previously had occupied the heights of boy-racer aspiration – began to look something your grandpa would pootle down to the pub in. Even the rally-bred Escorts driven by the local nutters seemed to hark back to another era, a decade where two dimensions were all you needed to race well and look good.

But everything about the Quattro was exotic, not just the drivetrain. The engine was a two point one, in-line five cylinder. The Turbo had something called an intercooler, which sounded, well, really cool. The dash was riddled with LCD displays and there were chrome trimmed Quattro badges all over the place. It was fast too the engine produced around 200 BHP and it could pull away to sixty in a shade over seven seconds, topping out at over 140 MPH.

The advent of the Quattro marked the rebirth of the Audi badge, and its innovations set the tone for much of the European car industry’s exploration of the possibilities of AWD and relatively small but powerful turbocharged engines. It didn’t matter that Group B had proved a dangerous blind alley. A generation had already become hooked on the innovations the psycho formula had encouraged.

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"Finnish rally maestro Hannu Mikkola was one of the legendary flying Finns who powered their way into motorsport lore during the Group B era at the wheel of the monstrous Audi Quattro S1 Sport. But as World Champion in 1983 and "

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